101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas
IDEA 48:
PUT OVER A CONSISTENT MESSAGE
Customers find it off-putting to check something out and find that different parts of an organization give even slightly different messages, yet especially with complex products it can be difficult to get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. Product knowledge is mentioned more than once in these pages and having the right information in the right forms is vital if selling is going to be successful. Prospects find it more difficult to understand the complexities of a proposal if they hear slightly different things from different people.
Idea
From global telecoms company Cables & Wireless…
Cable & Wireless operates in more than 70 countries. One regional division has activities especially well spread, with operations current in markets as diverse and far-flung as the Solomon Islands and the West Indies. When it launched a ranged of new internet products there was a need to ensure that members of the widely dispersed sales team understood them sufficiently well to do justice to selling them, and indeed to get the launch off to a good start.
The team was given the information through specially designed e-learning, which addressed the basic technical knowledge that sales people needed, together with the benefits and how to put them over to customers. The approach was designed to be lively and visual (for example equating networks to traffic and motorway junction). After a pilot, the scheme was made available simultaneously to some 1,400 staff, 94 per cent of whom reported favourably on both method and content.
In practice
Several points seem inherent here
- First, the company rated the importance of product knowledge highly.
- Second, this approach assisted the product launch to a considerable extent. It might have been a slower and less certain process if trainer(s) had had to travel the world conducting endless courses. The steps that were taken to ensure everyone involved had an excellence of knowledge from the moment of the launch paid dividends.
- The wise sales person pays attention to any assistance of this sort.